Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) is his second (and shortest, arguably most accessible book), published three years after he reached critical acclaim with his debut novel V. (1963) and, without a doubt, known as much for its actual content as it is for the sheer ubiquity with which it shows up on university course syllabi as an exemplary model of “postmodern fiction.”
The book is dense with allusions, oblique historical references, and red herrings, but the mechanics of the plot follow the genre conventions of standard hardboiled detective fiction. Beginning in the fictional Californian town of Kinneret, Oedipa Maas (married to ex-used car salesman turned radio jockey Mucho Maas) learns of the death of an ex-lover named Pierce Inverarity (a wealthy Californian real-estate mogul), who has left her as the executor of his estate. Oedipa travels to San Narcisco, a town near Los Angeles largely owned by Pierce, and meets with his lawyer, Metzger (who previously worked as a child actor named Baby Igor and with whom Oedipa initiates an affair). (A scene of note here is Oedipa and Metzger’s game of striptease, in which Oedipa drunkenly piles on every piece of clothing in her hotel room—an easy metaphor for our own encounter with the novel, as we strip away layer after layer only to find more unsolvable clues.) They are joined by The Paranoids, whose mediocre song lyrics (all favoring a faux-British vernacular style) punctuate the narrative.
The turning point in the novel is Oedipa and Metzger’s viewing of The Courier’s Tragedy, a Jacobean revenge play. At a certain point, “. . . a new mode of expression takes over. It can only be called a kind of ritual reluctance. Certain things, it is made clear, will not be spoken aloud; certain events will not be shown onstage; though it is difficult to imagine, given the excesses of the preceding acts, what these things could possibly be.” The climax is pinned to a single word, or name—Tystero—which becomes a point of paranoid fixation with Oedipa, the first major clue or coincidence in a pastiche of hardboiled mystery. Accosting the play’s director, the play is not meant to be read critically, but simply entertain: “Why is everybody so interested in texts?” the director bemoans, “Don’t drag me into your scholarly disputes.”
From this point forward, Oedipa becomes obsessive, convinced that Trystero, which we discover refers to the muted horn symbol of an alternative postal system and secret society, must either be a vast conspiracy or that she is losing her mind. The appearance of the symbol begins to haunt Oedipa, who drives up to Berkeley to determine if she is a “sensitive” capable of using Maxwell’s Demon. (The “sensitive” is, of course, also the “sensitive” reader of the text, a sorter of information, via its sleazy creator Nefastis: “Communication is the key . . .The Demon passes his data on to the sensitive, and the sensitive must reply in kind. There are untold billions of molecules in that box. The Demon collects data on each and every one. At some deep psychic level he must get through. The sensitive must receive that staggering set of energies, and feed back something like the same quantity of information.” Oedipa enters a hallucinatory sequence wandering across the Bay, encountering the symbol of the muted horn wherever she goes.
To recover from her rapid descent into paranoia, Oedipa visits her psychiatrist, Dr. Hilarius, only to discover he has gone mad upon reckoning with his past as a Nazi medical intern and holed himself up in his office with a rifle. The novel eventually ends with an apparent explanation of the heavily punned title: “Lot 49” is simply the bidding designation of Pierce’s stamp collection, with “crying” the way the auctioneer calls out a sale. We end the novel at yet another point of potential discovery: Oedipa waiting to hear the mysterious bidder interested in the stamp collection, which she believes will lead her to the truth regarding the Tystero secret society.
While the text is hailed as a premiere example of postmodern fiction, it simultaneously taunts any attempt at paranoid, or postmodern, reading of its many turns. It is a notable pastiche of the California detective story, as we might expect of Raymond Chandler, which Tony Tanner elaborates upon in his monograph Thomas Pynchon: “But in fact it works in a reverse direction,” Tanner writes. “With a detective story you start with a mystery and move towards a final clarification, all the apparently disparate, suggestive bits of evidence finally being bound together in one illuminating pattern; whereas in Pynchon's novel we move from a state of degree-zero mystery—just the quotidian mixture of an average Californian day—to a condition of increasing mystery and dubiety.”
We might view the appropriation of the detective genre as one of the many instances of pastiche in the novel. “Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language,” Fredric Jameson explains. “But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter.” In a historical period in which we are constantly bombarded by simulations rather than the real thing, the only option left is to mimic the past to understand it. Metzger’s character is another prime example: he is an actor-turned-lawyer, in the process of developing a television series about his life with his character played by a lawyer-turned-actor. (“A lawyer in a courtroom, in front of any jury, becomes an actor, right?”)
Pynchon’s idiosyncratic use of names is similarly saturated with meaning while, at the same time, being throughout evacuated of it. To again quote Tanner: “‘Character’” and identity are not stable in his fiction, and the wild names he gives his ‘characters,’ which seem either to signify too much (Oedipus and Newton indeed!) or too little (like comic-strip figures), are a gesture against the tyranny of naming itself.” Oedipa is Freud’s Oedipus, and Maas becomes another pun on both “lot” (mas in Spanish means more, or, perhaps, “a lot,” punned even further by the redundant name “Mucho Maas”) and Newtonian physics (the “mass” of an object). Oedipa’s nickname of “Oed,” by Mucho, becomes a common abbreviation for the Oxford English Dictionary.
We might turn as well to the naming of the text itself: The Crying of Lot 49. The title takes the form of an elaborate punchline, delivered in the very last set of pages under the mundane guise of a stamp auction. The “lot” puns are endless: we have the used car “lot” on which Mucho works and fails to find meaning, reminders of used housing “lots” in Los Angeles purchased by Pierce, and the eventual Lot 49 of that becomes Oedipa’s last hope at finding answers in her paranoid detective work. One variation of this pun, that I have yet to see critics suggest, is that “lot” is also a truncated version of the word “plot”: an ironic undertone, considering the book’s complete rejection of traditional plotting mechanics. Regardless, we might consider Oedipa as a character who, completely lacking any agency of her own, can only be swept along by the plot of the novel. Oedipa is always at the mercy of the crowd, pushing her into her next destination regardless of her own desires: “She tried to struggle out of the silent, gesturing swarm, but was too weak. Her legs ached, her mouth tasted horrible. They swept her on into the ballroom, where she was seized about the waist by a handsome young man in a Harris tweed coat and waltzed round and round, through the rustling, shuffling hush, under a great unlit chandelier.” (Another example: the crowd that pushes her into the gay bar in San Francisco, where she sees the Trystero symbol on the pin of a patron involved in a form of A.A. for lovers.)